“60 Minutes:” Steve Jobs on wealth, adoption, LSD and the afterlife

In an interview on tonight’s “60 Minutes,” Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson said the late Apple Inc. co-founder revealed his inner thoughts about adoption, wealth and business. He also revealed how his beliefs about the afterlife showed up in the design of Apple products.

Here are some excerpts from a “60 Minutes” transcript released by CBS News. The show will play tapes of some revealing interviews Isaacson had with Jobs, who died Oct. 5. In one, Jobs recalled an early childhood conversation with a neighbor about the fact that he was adopted:

STEVE JOBS TAPES: And she said, “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” Ooooh, lightning bolts went off in my head. I remember running into the house, I think I was like crying, asking my parents. And they sat me down and they said, “No, you don’t understand. We specifically picked you out.”

WALTER ISAACSON: He said, “From then on, I realized that I was not — just abandoned. I was chosen. I was special.” And I think that’s the key to understanding Steve Jobs.

Jobs also talked about dropping out of Reed College in Oregon after just one semester, at at time when Timothy Leary advised students to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

JOBS TAPES: The time we grew up in was a magical time. And it was also a very, you know, spiritual time in my life. Definitely taking LSD was one of the most important things in my life and not the most important. But right up there.

KROFT: Explain to me how somebody who was a hippie, a college dropout, somebody who drops LSD and marijuana goes off to India and comes back deciding he wants to be a businessman?

ISAACSON: Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn’t quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak’s board. Wanting to create a business. And I think that’s exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days … And Steve Jobs wasn’t all that eager to be an employee at Hewlett-Packard.

With Isaacson, Jobs talked about how money can change people:

JOBS ON TAPE: And a lot of people thought they had to start being rich … a few people went out and bought Rolls-Royces and they bought homes, and their wives got plastic surgery … and I saw these people who were really nice, simple people turn into these bizarro people. And I made a promise to myself. I said: “I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.”

And his final meetings with Isaacson, Jobs talked about death:

JOBS ON TAPE: I saw my life as an arc and that it would end and compared to that nothing mattered. You’re born alone, you’re going to die alone. And does anything else really matter? I mean what is it exactly is it that you have to lose Steve? You know? There’s nothing.

KROFT: Did you have any discussions within that day or at any other time about an afterlife?

ISAACSON: I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of — maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on. The he paused for a second and he said ‘yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.’ He said—and paused again, and he said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”

The interview with Isaacson airs at 7 p.m. tonight on “60 Minutes.” His book, “Steve Jobs,” will be published Monday by Simon & Schuster, which is a division of CBS Corp.